Relentless Love

Various love stories share the common premise of a person who must duplicate previous expressions of affection, day after day. The person who is object of devotion cannot remember prior attachment, whether the storyline involves a physical disorder or fantasy. Happy endings usually bring a day of transformation when relationship is recognized, love is reciprocated, and the pattern is finally broken.

My tears spring easily during any touching scene in even children's cartoons—(call me "Waterworks"). But the theme of a relentless love which endures in one heart and cannot be remembered by another moves me most deeply of all. These poignant tales stay with me for days, with an accompanying lump in my throat.

Such a story crossed my path two days ago. And for the first time, I see a spiritual parallel.

Our God often duplicates a particular expression of His affection and deliverance because we do not remember previous incidents of love and redemption. It's not that we forget, as above, but that we fail to remember. We're as helpless as characters who cannot remember. Whether The Fall altered memory bank brain cells or mortality weakens them, we have limited recall of the past.

A repeating pattern occurs throughout the books of Judges and Kings: deliverance, praise and prosperity, forgetfulness and backsliding, idolatry and lost prosperity, oppression and suffering, remembrance and repentance, cry for help and deliverance. When the people got stuck in forgetfulness and unrepentance, the Lord stepped in with horrific punishment followed by 70 years of exile, and the pattern was finally broken.

Perhaps Christians do not forget as badly, fall so far, and suffer such extreme discipline. But we tend to get stuck in ruts and routines which dampen affection, little or much. Circumstance can lure us into negative thought patterns which bring despair. Lies can be repeated often enough that we fail to remember Truth.

If we think we cannot wait another day or hour or minute for our circumstances to change, perhaps we need only call to mind past deliverance and be assured that our Deliver is standing by, waiting for the right moment to step in. If adversity brings us a taste of death, I think it is because we fail to remember the life in us.

When brokenness overwhelms, we need only recall past healing to find hope for the moment.

Regardless of whether our memory clicks in instantly or after duplicate expressions of affection, we can be sure that our God is showing His deep love, day after day, always waiting for us to remember past deliverance, recognize depth of relationship, and reciprocate relentless love.

~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~

I am now a biweekly contributor to Everyday Testimony, where a few words of fresh thanks are daily given to God from a variety of His people. My prayer there today, of gratitude for recent deliverance, coincides with this post.

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Copyright 2011, Anne Lang Bundy, all rights reserved.